The sound of Elgar follows Bliss down Daphne Lovelace’s front path a couple of hours later. “I’ll be perfectly all right,” she repeatedly assures him, and he finally accedes to her request for some solitude. But the mournful music is still beating into his brain as he joins the motorway back to London, so he turns on the radio to change the tune.
“I’d hardly describe it as an epidemic,” the minister of health is saying, and Bliss knows immediately that the man is being questioned on the current rash of suicides.
“Then, how would you categorize it, Minister?” demands the interviewer.
“There is no doubt that the figures confirm a slightly increased rate over the past week or so,” admits the minister.
And that doesn’t include Minnie, Bliss tells himself, while wondering if other unexpected deaths may have been similarly misdiagnosed.
“It’s being suggested by certain elderly support groups that the government is actually encouraging seniors to kill themselves to alleviate pressures on overburdened medical facilities.”
“Nonsense!” exclaims the minister, but he is immediately ambushed by an irate welfare advocate.
“Minister,” explodes the crusty-voiced woman, “your own figures suggest that as many as sixty percent of the elderly are unable to access care facilities; and with the increasing number of baby boomers…”
Muttering, “I’m surprised she didn’t accuse him of pumping out do-it-yourself euthanasia kits,” Bliss changes the channel and focuses on the road.
Ten miles ahead, where the motorway cuts a swath though the ancient village of Nettlebrook, a soaring footbridge swoops over the six-lane highway and carries gaggles of schoolchildren to and from the village school. But it’s eleven-forty in the morning, a time when, apart from a harried housewife hustling to the village store or the occasional hiker trekking across the South Downs, the footbridge is usually deserted. This morning is an exception: James Edward Temple, an eighty-five-year-old army veteran who has been a genial bar fixture at the local pub for the past fifty years, stands on the approach ramp in the heavy drizzle, looking down at the torrent of traffic and sees a gloomy future.
“I’ll never make it by twelve,” Bliss tells himself as he peers anxiously ahead through the spray, and he’s forced to call Edwards.
“One o’clock. My office. And no more excuses,” snaps the chief superintendent.
The signed resignation letter in his jacket pocket tempts Bliss — it only needs today’s date — but he’s unwilling to abandon his mission. “I’ll do my best, sir,” he responds as a traffic snarl ahead cuts his speed still further.
James Temple is also on a mission and, in Service tradition he’s bulled his boots, polished the buttons of his British Legion jacket and pinned on his medals. Tobruk, El Alamein and Sicily laud the old Desert Rat’s battle honours, proclaiming that he had shown his mettle alongside Monty in 1942 and had shipped across the Mediterranean in July of 1943 to be with Eisenhower at the start of the European liberation.
At his present speed, Bliss is nearly ten minutes away from the lofty footbridge in Nettlebrook, but he’s in no hurry. If Edwards craps all over him for being late, he can always whip out his resignation letter. It sits, like a concealed weapon, in his pocket, and gives him considerable comfort.
Temple feels the same way about his maroon military beret. It’s faded and battered now, and a moth has taken a bite out of one side, but it safely saw him through the war when so many of his colleagues’ steel helmets proved to be soft targets, so he has put his faith in it again today as he straightens it on his balding head, squares his shoulders and readies himself for his final assault.
Two miles, just under four minutes, to the bridge for Bliss. The traffic has speeded somewhat and he’s checking the car’s clock. “Nearly twelve,” he muses, and guesses that he’ll easily make it to Edwards’ door by one.
Temple checks his watch. “Three minutes to zero hour, Sergeant Major,” he barks loudly and pulls himself to attention. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” he says, then orders, “By the left… wait for it… wait for it… Quick march.”
On the bridge ahead of Temple, the dreary English day slowly turns to a dark Sicilian night, and the sky is suddenly lit by a thousand flares as the Germans and Italians prepare to defend the Mediterranean island; but the howitzers and machine guns aren’t for him this day. “Left, right, left, right,” he sings out with his head high, and he marches towards the far side where a cheering throng of Sicilian girls are waving and throwing flowers. “Hello, Johnny,” they yell, and urge him onwards as he crosses in the sky over the motorway.
A giant gravel truck ploughing through the surface water is blocking Bliss with a cascade of spray, and he decides to sit back while others race blindly ahead.
“Parade halt!” orders Temple as he reaches the northern side of the bridge to find that the crowd has evaporated into the past. “About turn!” he bellows, and pirouettes neatly. “By the left… Quick march!” he yells again, and the steel decking sings as Temple marches back to the zenith of the bridge high above the London-bound traffic.
The sweep of the bridge is directly ahead of Bliss now, though it’s hazy in the wash of the enormous truck, but the figure of the lone soldier is clearly visible as he stands erect with his lips formed into a bugle, trumpeting “The Last Post” to the wind.
“What on earth is he doing?” Bliss wonders as he races towards the bridge.
“Parade… dismiss,” commands Temple, then he spins smartly to his left and stamps his right boot so solidly into the decking that it sets the metal bridge shivering from end to end. “One, two, three,” he counts before snapping the sharpest salute of his entire career, then he takes four quick steps and dives headfirst over the balustrade.
“What the hell…” screeches Bliss, and he is instantly on his brakes as the old soldier plummets directly into the path of the gravel truck ahead of him. But the truck driver is too close to the plunging man and is oblivious to the danger until his windshield explodes.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” yells Bliss with his eyes in his mirrors, willing himself into the psyches of the following drivers, while around him other drivers are chatting idly to their passengers as they forge unsuspectingly into the murk.
Einstein’s law of relativity kicks in and slows Bliss’s world, and he watches in amazement as the dozing driver behind him suddenly wakes up, slams on his brakes and slews violently into the path of a speeding BMW in the next lane.
Bliss is rapidly decelerating as the gravel truck looms large in his path, and he watches a ballet of the doomed in his mirror as car after car veers sharply to avoid him and smash into others. But the driver of a giant low-loader, laden with steel girders, knows that he can’t risk swerving and losing control so he brakes, though not soon enough, and the sky behind Bliss blackens. He desperately searches for a way out but, with speeding vehicles crashing either side and the slowing gravel truck ahead, he finds no escape.
“This is it,” sighs Bliss in resignation, and he is bracing for the crushing impact when the driver of the gravel truck abruptly loses his grip on life and leaves forty tons of rock in control.
“Oh, no,” Bliss yells as the truck swerves towards the central barrier. But suddenly the road ahead of him is completely deserted, and with the words of the bishop at Minnie’s funeral — “Yea, though I shall walk through the valley of the shadow of death” — in mind, he squeezes the throttle and leaves the carnage behind.
The wreckage is piling up on the London-bound carriageway as Bliss checks that he is clear of danger before sliding to a halt on the hard shoulder. But the mayhem is just beginning on the Westchester-bound side, where the gravel truck’s remains, and most of its load, are sending cars, trucks and vans fishtailing along the wet road and crashing into each other.
A motor coach, crammed to the roof with elderly gamblers on a pilgrimage to a golden shrine, slams into the hurtling cab of the runaway truck and bursts into flames, then vehicle after vehicle smash into the inferno.
Bliss leaps out of his car, unscathed, and looks around in disbelief. “Oh my God!” he breathes and reaches for his cell phone.
“Eleven dead and sixteen seriously injured, most of them seniors with severe burns,” a BBC radio reporter is saying into his microphone three hours later, when Bliss eventually slips exhausted into a makeshift refreshment tent that a group of villagers has set up on the roadside. Police, fire and ambulance personnel jostle for space as the reporter continues, “A police spokesperson estimates that it will be several hours before the road is reopened,” and Bliss asks for a tea.
“Are you all right, sir?” asks a straight-backed, bearded man with a degree of authority familiar to Bliss. “You look all done in.”
“No, I’m fine,” says Bliss as he flicks open his wallet. “Metropolitan Police.”
“George Donaldson,” says the oldtimer in a broad country brogue as he pours from a giant pot borrowed from the village hall. “I used to be the local bobby here, afore they took away our bikes and gave a bunch o’ bloomin’ schoolkids fancy panda cars,” he explains, confirming Bliss’s suspicion.
“Better not let Superintendent Donaldson hear…” starts Bliss, then he pauses with a quizzical look as the old man’s name rings a bell, and George Donaldson laughs. “That’s my son, Ted, over at Westchester you’d be talking about.”
“So I guess you know what happened, then.”
“Oh. Yeah. Old Jimmy Temple jumped off the bridge,” he replies nonchalantly, as if it’s a regular occurrence.
“You knew him?”
“I told my missus that summit like this ‘ud ‘appen,” George continues, then leans in to whisper, “Alzheimer’s,” as if he is afraid of the word.
“Oh, dear.”
“It started a couple o’ weeks ago when he slapped a thousand quid on the bar in the White Swan sayin’, ‘Drinks are on me ‘til it runs out.’”
“A thousand pounds?” queries Bliss.
“Well, there were bloomin’ chaos. Must ‘a bin nigh on five ‘undred people crammed in that ther’ pub within ten minutes. An’ when the money ran out, old Bert, the landlord, were on the phone to the police station, but that were a waste o’ time. ‘Leave it to me, Bert,’ I said and I arrested Jimmy for causin’ a breach of the peace. Not that I had the power to do it, mind you, but it were just a way o’ getting’ him outside afore he were lynched. ‘What d’ye wanna do a daft thing like that fer?’ I said to ‘im, but he didn’t care. ‘Plenty more where that came from, George,’ he laffed.”
Bliss’s cell phone rings — the tenth such occasion since lunchtime — and he checks the caller’s I.D. It’s Edwards again; his spirits sink, but now he has time to respond.
“David, it’s Mike Edwards. Look, I’ve only just heard what happened. Are you injured?”
“No. Just pretty shaken up…”
“Well, don’t worry about a thing. Take as much time as you want. Have the rest of the week off. I hear you did a great job getting some oldies out of a burning bus.”
“Well, it was —”
“I’m putting you in for a commendation.”
“Thank —”
“And I’ve got a nice little jaunt lined up for you. How do you fancy a conference in Seattle next week? They want an expert to speak about the growing international problem of people trafficking and I thought you’d be ideal.”
“That would be —”
“Fabulous… By the way, I might have been a bit hasty when I called earlier. Sorry about that. Just wipe out the messages, will you.”
That was short and smarmy, thinks Bliss, wondering if he’d heard correctly. Did he actually say sorry? he queries, then replays Edwards’ previous messages and tut-tuts over the string of abusive expletives, but gleefully saves each one. One more nail in your coffin, Mr. Edwards, he is thinking to himself when he feels a tap on his shoulder.
“So you’ve met my old dad, have you?” says Superintendent Donaldson.
“Yes,” laughs Bliss with an eye on the senior officer’s stomach. “I should’ve spotted the likeness. Interesting man; he seems to have his finger on the pulse. He was telling me about the old boy suddenly splashing his dough around a few weeks ago.”
“I heard about that, but he was always a bit loopy. That’s what happens to men who spend too much time on their own without a good woman to keep them sane,” says Donaldson with an expressive wink. “Anyway,” he carries on, “we can manage now if you want to get off home.”
“Actually, I’m going back to Daphne’s. I wasn’t at all happy leaving her this morning.”
Elgar is still performing as Bliss rings Daphne’s frontdoor bell, but it’s at a normal level now. Daphne, on the other hand, is far from normal. She’s still wearing her nightdress and dressing gown, and her teeth are lying in a tumbler by her bedside.
“I didn’t expect you back,” she says with apparent grumpiness.
“Obviously.”
Then she takes in his dishevelled appearance. “Oh my God. You’ve ruined another coat.”
“Bit of an accident,” he mumbles, as he leads her to the kitchen, saying, “I could use a special cup of your Keemun.” But she breaks into a flood of tears and slumps into a chair.
Bliss doesn’t need to ask; the signs are all around him. Breakfast dishes still litter the kitchen table, Missie Rouge is begging at the fridge door, and another dead gin bottle has hit the floor.
“What is it?” he asks gently as he hands her one of several fallen handkerchiefs.
“It’s Thursday, David. Minnie always came for tea.”
“I’ll light the fire,” he says, heading for the sitting room, but Daphne has other ideas. “I’d rather be on my own, David,” she says, rising determinedly and edging him towards the front door. “You’ve got plenty of work to do, I’m sure.”
“Edwards has given me the rest of the week off.”
“Then you should visit Daisy. You’ve wasted enough time on me,” says Daphne, and he’s immediately torn between spending a wet weekend in Westchester or flying to the Côte d’Azur for a few days in the sun with the current love of his life. It has been a month since he’s seen her, and he’s beginning to worry that his next phone bill might be delivered in a truck considering the number of nights he’s lain in bed like a teenager, whispering, “Jet’adore,” into the phone, while listening to her quirky articulation and her inability to sound th without adding a zed. “I zhink you are so ‘andsome, Daavid, and I love you also,” she would say, and he’d chuckle in warm memory of the first time they had met in Provence, when she had asked, in all seriousness, “What can I do you for?”
“I think I will light the fire…” Bliss starts again, but Daphne is determined and stands sentinel at the sitting-room door. Now what? he wonders, finding himself in a standoff with an aging toothless tiger. “Okay,” he says with a deadpan face, and he makes a convincing feint for the front door before doubling back to the sitting room, muttering, “I think I left my pen…”
If the state of the kitchen had taken Bliss by surprise, the sitting room sinks him. Incriminating evidence is strewn all over the table and floor. Daphne has turned her filing cabinet inside out and has obviously been putting her affairs in order; she has even labelled a few of her more treasured items with names of beneficiaries.
“What’s this all about?” Bliss wants to know sternly.
Daphne employs another flood of tears to duck the question and he guides her gently back to the kitchen chair as she mumbles through snivels, “She did it for me, David.”
“That’s nonsense. She did it because she’d got herself into a tight spot and didn’t know how to escape.”
“But if I’d got that letter on time, none of this would have happened.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he protests, but Daphne doesn’t want to hear, and rambles on. “That’s the trouble with life’s lottery, David. Everyone thinks you’re the winner if you outlive all your peers, but actually you’re the loser. Every death leaves a deeper wound, and every funeral is just another painful rehearsal for your own. Well, I think I’ve just about got the hang of it now.”
“Daphne! You’ve got to snap out of this, now,” Bliss insists firmly.
“Oh, don’t worry. As silly as it may seem, I don’t think I’m as brave as Minnie. Anyway, the thought of that poor train driver — he probably dreamt of being on the railways from his first train set and never imagined he’d end up pulverizing an old woman —”
“Okay,” interrupts Bliss roughly. “Enough of this. I’m going to clear up the kitchen while you get washed and tidied. I am taking you somewhere really posh for dinner, so you’d better put on a decent hat or we’ll get thrown out.”
“But —”
“No buts or I’ll have to arrest you for disobeying a lawful order.”
A wry smile, the first in a week, puffs out Daphne’s cheeks. “Roger, wilco, sir,” she says, then she pauses as she heads for the stairs. “Oh, by the way, Trina called from Vancouver. No one seems to have heard of CNL Distribution.”
In truth, Trina Button hasn’t made any enquiries beyond the phone book and the Western Union office in White Rock. She has been too busy with her training schedule, and she spends much of each day raising eyebrows in the ritzy area of West Vancouver where she lives by puffing up the hills on a rattle-trap of a bicycle while wearing a stencilled T-shirt saying, “Wanted — Your Kidneys. Dead or Alive.”
Daphne also wants kidneys an hour later at The Limes, but she chooses hers flambéed in cognac, to be followed by tenderloin of wild boar on a pear purée, while confessing to Bliss that she’s been so down since Minnie’s death that she’s hardly eaten.
The fresh memory of a busload of burnt bodies is enough to put Bliss off charred flesh for a week, so he flipflops between a Dover sole and the vegetarian’s platter as he looks up to say, “But this isn’t the Daphne Lovelace that I know.”
“Sometimes I feel myself slipping,” admits Daphne. “The crazy thing is that when you get to my age the only thing you have to look forward to is memories of the past. I mean, take Phil and Maggie next door; they’ve been dead for nearly twenty years, but they just can’t afford a decent burial, so they carry on.”
“I know what you mean,” laughs Bliss, thinking of his own parents slowly mouldering in front of a television as they wait for the Reaper’s knock.
“You’ve seen the poor old souls in senior’s homes, David. Those places are just undertakers’ waiting rooms. The Eskimos have the right idea: stick granny on an ice floe and wave her goodbye.”
“I doubt if they still do that.”
“Well, they should. It would save the Canadian health service a fortune.”
The probable savings in geriatric care costs as the number of suicides mount has not been lost on the public or the media in England, neither has it been ignored by more than a few families who have watched their long-anticipated inheritances being gobbled up by nursing homes and pharmacies, and Bliss isn’t the only person wondering how many old folks might be being pushed, in one way or another.
“Talking of money,” he says as their entrées arrive, “I suppose I should put in a formal request through Interpol to find out why Minnie sent that money to Canada, although I’m going to be near there next week. Edwards is trying to butter me up with a trip to Seattle, though God knows when he thinks I’ll have time to write my speech.”
“Trina invited me over to Vancouver for a break,” continues Daphne lethargically, “but I don’t have anyone to go with now that Minnie’s passed on.”
“You should go. I bet the Rockies in autumn are fabulous,” Bliss begins, then pauses with an idea. “In fact, I could take you.”
“Oh, you needn’t —”
“No arguments. It’s just as easy for me to fly into Vancouver, but can you afford it?”
“Well, I had put some spending money aside for the trip with Minnie.”
“Good. Start packing. I’ll arrange the flights for Monday.”
Friday morning starts on Thursday night for Bliss as he takes advantage of the clear road and races back to London. The last of the late-night drunks are still being hauled off the streets as Bliss sets to work on the mountain of reports that a couple of clerks had spent the evening culling from central records.
“The illicit trafficking in human beings,” he types onto a clean screen and works his way through a million miserable lives as he catalogues the tides of poverty-stricken Southeast Asians braving the Pacific in rust buckets to reach North America; Iraqis and Afghanis desperate to be anywhere but the ruins created for them by their supposed liberators; North Africans trekking across the Mediterranean to Turkey seeking a better life, while the Turks trudge northward to Germany for the same reason; Moroccans swimming the Strait of Gibraltar searching for Spanish gold, while Sub-Saharan Africans flee despotic rulers and the desertification of their land; and South Sea Islanders sailing away to an uncertain future as their homes sink under a slowly rising ocean.
“Christ! The whole bloody world is on the move,” Bliss muses at one point as he reads of the millions of impoverished Mexicans flooding the United States to join the thousands of persecuted Cubans who’ve risked everything on the leaky boat of a trafficker or a rubber-tire raft, and he can’t help but marvel at the roll of the dice that put him in a white skin in a safe, warm land.
After five hours he has ten pages of notes, but if the conference organizers are expecting him to come up with a solution they’ll be disappointed. “As long as multinational corporations collaborate with a handful of powerful Western governments to maintain a thousand-fold disparity between the incomes of the rich and the poor for their own self-aggrandizement, there will always be a trade in people trafficking,” he concludes, and is tempted to add that it might be a lot simpler to bump everyone off and start from scratch.
It’s seven-thirty a.m. and Bliss heads to the canteen for a quick coffee, but he finds himself ensnared by the breakfast television show as the latest suicide figures are trotted out on hastily generated scoreboards.
“Here’s the situation at a glance,” says the presenter with the same tone he’d used to announce the results of the general election, and it’s immediately apparent to Bliss that the railways have continued to bear the brunt of the crisis, with fourteen jumpers in the past twenty-four hours. However, when James Temple’s busload of elderly victims is included in the equation, the roads take the top spot with twenty-three deaths, while household poisons, car exhausts and prescription drugs vie for third place and bring the total to a round fifty.
As with any new disease, the public and press are well ahead of the authorities, and numerous gerontologists and psychiatrists specializing in the elderly have warned that mass hysteria may cause an unstoppable tide of death.
“We’re starting to see the lemming effect in action,” one studious doomsayer reports, totally ignoring the fact that, over the years, numerous scientific studies have completely debunked the mass suicide theory of the arctic rodents.
“I think we are witnessing the first manifestations of the coming Armageddon,” a freaky religious guru promulgates, and the idea is certainly picking up steam as more and more deaths are reported.
“Doctors are reporting a major increase in the number of people requesting prescriptions for tranquilizers,” reads an editorial in the Financial Times, prompting an immediate run on the shares of certain drug companies. While the wives of stockbrokers with holdings in undertakers, funeral parlours, crematoriums, florists, limousines and law firms are already choosing colours for their new Porsches.
Chief Superintendent Edwards is surprised to find Bliss already at his desk when he arrives a little before nine.
“Ah, nice of you to come back, Chief Inspector,” he starts with a smile, then he spots the pile of paperwork on Bliss’s desk and puts on a darker face. “I hope you haven’t started on that lot yet.”
“Finished,” announces Bliss triumphantly.
“Actually, David,” begins Edwards, in a tone that Bliss immediately recognizes as a precursor to disenchantment, “I’m going to have to cancel your trip. The Home Secretary has asked the Commissioner to set up a squad to look into this suicide nonsense, and I’ve recommended that you be appointed to head it.”
“Well, thank you for your consideration, sir,” says Bliss, sweeping his hand over the papers on his desk, “but I’m already prepared for Seattle.”
“Chief Inspector, you know the score,” continues Edwards with his ears closed. “Ten thousand snuff it in an earthquake in Turkmenistan or Timbuktu and nobody gives a toss, but if a few crumblies in Tower Hamlets are considerate enough to bump themselves off to save the taxpayers a few quid, the public expects a bloody special squad.”
“But I’ve already booked the tickets,” lies Bliss.
“Well, cancel them — what d’ye mean, ‘tickets’?”
“I’m taking Daphne Lovelace,” Bliss explains, careful not to mention that he’d also planned on inviting Daisy.
“You’re not still granny-sitting that batty old bird, are you?” scoffs Edwards. “Christ, she was prancing around like a bloody head banger at Peter Bryan’s wedding.”
“Well, she’s not prancing around now,” Bliss protests. “She needs a bit of a change of scenery.” But it gets him nowhere.
“Cancel, Bliss,” orders Edwards as he stomps off. “And I’ll expect a preliminary report on the suicide situation by nine Monday morning.”
How quickly the veneer of niceness slips from the face of the insincere, thinks Bliss as he picks up his phone and hits the first number on his speed dial.
“Allô?” answers a familiar voice as a phone rings in a real-estate agent’s in the quaint Provençal resort of St. Juan-sur-Mer.
“Bonjour, Daisy,” replies Bliss, “Comment allezvous, ma petite pucelle?”
“Daavid,” she laughs, “you are still speaking zhe French like zhe Spanish cow — Tu parles français comme une vache espagnole.”
“Zhank you,” mocks Bliss with a laugh before inviting her to join him for a week’s holiday in Seattle.